Price: £14.99 for the box, £24.99 for a pack which include Movies, Entertainment or Sports passes.

Age Range: n/a

Manufacturer’s Description: Say hello to our shiny NOW TV Box. It’s bursting with features to unleash your TV’s full potential and give you control of the TV you love.

Rating: (5/5 stars)

Review: We have been using NOW TV in our house now for over a year now, and it is a great complement to our YouView tv box. Until I joined their blog squad and got a voucher for a few months of service for the purpose of reviewing, NOW TV was the only money we were spending on tv – we don’t have a Sky or Virgin box.

We love NOW TV as, with two small children, we don’t get to go out to the cinema very often. Instead, we tend to curl up together on the sofa and watch movies on-demand, or something from our small Blu-Ray collection of firm favourites. Since getting our NOW TV subscription, we have to really love a film to buy it on disc – as there always something to watch and enjoy on the box.

We have been using a first gen NOW TV box upstairs for months and while we really like the software it can be a little bit slow at times. Downstairs, we have been using the PS4 app to watch films & tv which while it worked great, was a bit of a pain as the controller stayed on the whole time, and we found that the batteries would run down a bit fast.

We have put our new 2nd gen NOW TV box downstairs in the living room, and the small black box looks great in our entertainment unit. It is really easy to set up; you simply plug it into a power socket, hook up your tv via HDMI, and you can then either use wifi or connect via a network cable. This is a significant change to the first box which is wifi only, so if your wifi network isn’t up to scratch you now have the option to used a more stable wired connection instead. We did have it hooked up via cable to begin with as we had a port free, but we have since switched it over to wifi and it is working fine.

The latest software update to the NOW TV boxes is a significant improvement – both on our first gen box and the new box. It is really easy to browse movies and tv shows on demand, and the search function is massively improved. This new box is capable of outputting 1080p which looks great; although NOW TV content is currently limited to 720p it’s nice to know the hardware is capable of that going up – and the BBC iPlayer app does use full HD which looks fantastic on our big screen.

The new remote is pretty much just a black version of the previous one, but all black instead of white, and with a Sky Store button replacing the Apps button. I do find the NOW TV button handy to go straight to the homepage of the NOW TV app, so I tend to use that a lot.

As well as the NOW TV app, you also get access to a whole host of on demand content via apps like iPlayer, itv Player, 4OD, and YouTube – among others. You can download all manner of specialist content apps from the Roku store too, which is great.

This new 2nd gen box looks better, works faster, has a nicer remote, and is all around much nicer to use. The affordable cost means James is already planning to upgrade our first gen box to one of these newer, better ones – not that we really need to! We give this 5 stars – it’s a great and inexpensive way to turn your TV into a “Smart TV” and get access to some of the latest and best movies and entertainment while you’re at it!

2 thoughts on “Review: NOW TV (2015 – 2nd gen box)”

Now TV is definitely something we would like to look into when we move – it seems so straightforward! Thanks for linking up with #TriedTested

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Hi, I’m Zoe

Welcome to Mama Geek, the tale of a 30-something geek as I stumble through the weird & wonderful world of motherhood! I have two little girls, Georgie & Lydia, a fab husband, James, and an adorable, if stupid, dog named Homily. I'm work from home as a web & graphic designer. Stick around to share our journey!

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